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rdevilla

435 karma · joined October 30, 2014

Don't know where it goes, but it's ~/ to me.

https://txt.ryandv.me

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rdevilla··on Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people
> If the job market were not what it is I would have quit there and then.

> I feel like people using AI to both read and interpret language is the death of rigorous language.

Thank you for your perspective. It is very validating (and in this case, still extremely disappointing) when strangers come to the same conclusions as yourself.

rdevilla··on The Great Majority: Body Snatching and Burial Reform in 19th-Century Britain
You lost weight yet Todd? You're going to need a triple bypass at your BMI.
rdevilla··on Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
The whole internet is like this now, and it's only just getting started. Makes me sick tbh, and I am still questioning if this is the kind of industry I want to work in.
rdevilla··on The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew
Yes, exactly.
rdevilla··on The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
rdevilla··on The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs
I don't understand why humans abstract a business leader away from the realities of building software, while LLMs do not.

If the rhetoric is to be believed, the set of responsibilities falling to the role of "software engineer" is shrinking to zero, and all engineers are being forcibly "promoted" to the managerial class of shepherding around agents.

rdevilla··on Stop Flock
It's for their, and your, own safety.
rdevilla··on The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs
By this definition, pre-LLM "business leaders" circa 2008 with not even an understanding of Excel were already "software engineers" this whole time - just prompting out software through their meatspace agents, instead of their silicon ones.

Dismissal of arguments as "just semantics" is high school level argumentation.

rdevilla··on Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)
Liking intellectual challenges on Hacker News is very 2008. It's 2026, the AI will write a compiler in 5 minutes, no headache required.

If you're still playing with Rubik's cubes you're going to get left behind.

rdevilla··on Stop Flock
It's not achievable.

The only way is through - everybody should get into the practice of stalking and gossiping about each other in a Molochian environment, where the people who do not do so suffer from the losing side of an information asymmetry.

Expect AI, especially post-Mythos, to just enable this at even further scale. Consumer grade wireless networking gear as a whole is a very wide attack surface and is basically never updated.

rdevilla··on Multi-Agentic Software Development Is a Distributed Systems Problem
This site is just inundated with LLM slop now. Moltbook everywhere, all day, every day.
rdevilla··on Multi-Agentic Software Development Is a Distributed Systems Problem
Please stop. I can't take HN seriously any more with comments like this here.
rdevilla··on Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug
> It all sort of ties into Heisenberg's uncertainty theorem. A system cannot be fully described from within that system.

Surely you are talking about Godel incompleteness, not Heisenberg's uncertainty principle; in which case they're actually not the same system - the verification/proof language is more like a metalanguage taking the implementation language as its object.

(Godel's observation for mathematics was just that for formal number systems of sufficient power, you can embed that metalanguage into the formal number system itself.)

rdevilla··on Taking on CUDA with ROCm: 'One Step After Another'
Ah yes, but those hundred lines of code are basically free to produce now with LLMs...
rdevilla··on Taking on CUDA with ROCm: 'One Step After Another'
ROCm is not supported on some very common consumer GPUs, e.g. the RX 580. Vulkan backends work just fine.
rdevilla··on Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage
Bubble's bursting, get in.
rdevilla··on The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture
> A definition by which every human alive ever qualifies as a magician

Exactly correct.

Chapter 2: "No, every act of your life is a magical act; whenever from ignorance, carelessness, clumsiness or what not, you come short of perfect artistic success, you inevitably register failure, discomfort, frustration. [...] Why should you study and practice Magick? Because you can't help doing it, and you had better do it well than badly."

rdevilla··on The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture
You either see it or you don't.
rdevilla··on The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture
I mean, I've had pipe dreams of a parallel networking stack built on IPv6 with a killer app offering real peer-to-peer networking again. But who will deploy and maintain all the new IPv6 networking gear, infrastructure, undersea cables? This is not something within the purview of the average (or even above average) hacker any more; the encumbents are too firmly entrenched.
rdevilla··on The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture
Speaking of myths, pixies, and spirits:

> I. DEFINITION:

> MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.

> (Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take “magical weapons,” pen, ink, and paper; I write “incantations”—these sentences—in the “magical language” i.e. that which is understood by people I wish to instruct.

> I call forth “spirits” such as printers, publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution is thus an act of MAGICK by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.)

- Aleister Crowley, "Magick Without Tears," Chapter I, 1954. https://hermetic.com/crowley/magick-without-tears/mwt_01

rdevilla··on The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture
> (Claude Code got mandated at my work this week. Like literally engineers must use CC.)

I'm taking a break from this industry until the madness blows over. I cannot even, anymore.

rdevilla··on The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture
Ok. How do you propose one fights back? Do you really viscerally understand what it is you are fighting against?
rdevilla··on What does it mean to “write like you talk”?
I don't agree that one should "write like they talk." Certain forms of writing are fundamentally a higher and more complex register of language, because they have gone through more rounds of refinement and editing, while speech is generally composed one-shot; you can't "go backwards" and make edits to your speech, except by going forwards and issuing more speech to make corrections and amendments to what you've already said. That is, speech is "write once," given the fact that it needs to be composed extemporaneously.

Try talking like an academic on the street - you'll get laughed out of the alleyway. Informal conversation often needs to target the lowest common denominator, which is the most you can expect from the average person out in the "real world;" that is, of course, unless you are reading from a prepared speech - which is the composition of a speechwriter, prepared ahead of time, instead of improvised on the spot. Writing can target more advanced audiences because you're not limited by space and time to the people in your immediate vicinity, but people who self-select into your subject matter - for instance, on fora like this one, which represent a small minority of technically inclined readers.

One can write extemporaneously in this style - that's the IRC and chatroom register of written speech, and it has its place, but I don't think this is the form of writing that the author of the article had in mind. For instance, I doubt that this article was composed one-shot in an IRC chatroom and then published verbatim, but went through many rounds of editing. That's not how "people really talk."

Of course, if one is in more enlightened company, their informal, extemporaneous speech can start to take on more complexity and jargon. You need to target your communication to your audience.

For what it's worth, most of this post was written one-shot with minimal revision, but with pauses to think about what to write next. These kinds of pauses are usually known as "awkward" in every day speech over beers. I will maybe go over the post and make some edits as I read over it again.

rdevilla··on AI may be making us think and write more alike
This state of affairs presages the advent of a second dark age - one that will forever eclipse the era of radical openness & transparency that once served the software community for decades. Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM whok would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale, until any possible information asymmetries have been arbitraged away. The development & secrecy of technique will once again become a deep moat as LLMs fall into local, suboptimal minima, trained on and marketed towards the lowest common denominator. The Internet, or at least, The Web, becomes a Dark Forest of the Dead Internet (Theory), in which humans fear of speaking out and capturing the attention of the LLM who would siphon their creative essence for more, ever more training data. Interaction contracts into small meshes of trusted, verifiably human participants to keep the tides of spamslop at bay. Quasi-monastic orders that still scribe with pen and paper emerge, that believe there is still value in training and educating a human mind and body.

- Unknown, 19 Feb 2026

rdevilla··on Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"
HN will flag and downvote anti AI sentiment. There is lots of it here, you just aren't allowed to see it.
rdevilla··on Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"
In Canada, demands are not actually demands. That way if the demand is avoided, there never was a demand to begin with; however, if it was fulfilled, then of course there was always a demand all along.
rdevilla··on Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"
It's extremely prevalent in Canada as well; almost certainly even more so. It's really a North American thing.

I expect copious downvotes with no actual replies. Then the comment will be flagged by the bot armies so the administration here can preserve its dearly held national identity of being "diverse" while never having elected an ethnic minority PM.

rdevilla··on Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game
I loved this game playing on an Arch Thinkpad in university with budget graphics capability.

The best part is being able to pin locations on the map for your teammates, so we were able to plot the adventures and battlegrounds of a goated unit by naming the pins "Ronant's Triumph," "Ronant's Revenge," "Ronant's Folly," and ultimately "Ronant's Last Stand." Great times with a few beers and the lads.

RIP Ronant, Wesnoth will never see another hero of your like again.

rdevilla··on Anthropic is burning more and more dev goodwill
Understood. I will now aggressively flag so called "clickbait" on HN.
rdevilla··on Demand for autism care is soaring
It's because people have discovered that (1) motte and bailey fallacies [0] and equivocation of language (between, e.g. identity and diagnosis) are highly effective rhetorical tools; (2) merely identifying as something ontologically changes the metaphysical structure of reality [1] which confers certain societal benefits.

There is a matrix of is-diagnosed, is-not-diagnosed, identifies-as, does-not-identify-as, which is open to exploitation by those who "identify as" something they are not diagnosed with. Who gets fucked? The people who are diagnosed but do not identify as their diagnosis.

God help me once we start adding another dimension of people who have a condition, but are also not diagnosed and do not identify with it either...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538165

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